My Imagination Is Power

10 meg Quicktime
Full version sent off to ScreenVision yesterday.

Only....8 more seconds to render!

After hearing about the success of highschool classmate Dony Permedi's animation "Kiwi", and it's success on YouTube (5.7 million views!) I decided to post my own animation work, and get a bit more exposure. Might as well take advantage of my status as Time's Person of the Year.

I've set up a YouTube channel here to show off my videos. I'll be adding more as I go along, YouTube's being flakey right now, but I'm hoping to tag them and mark them all so I can hopefully get the right sort of eyes on them, and lead them back to my portfolio.

I finished this up a few days ago. Its up being voted on right now at the10 Second Club website. Their voting is a little messed up, so I'm not really sure when I'll know how well I did, and start getting feedback on it.

From what I saw, this months contributions didn't look so hot, so I may have a pretty good shot at placing fairly well...but who knows what other people will think.

I've been working on my first contribution to the 10 Second Club. Only 7 days left! Can I make it?? I've put up a test render of the state that it is in now, just click the link at the bottom of this post.

At this point I need to refine the body movements. There's a lot of refining to do. What you see is the result of just putting him into the major poses he'll take at those points in the animation. Next I need to change the timing on bits, add pauses, speed up certain turns and such. I should be able to get it to a point where I can put it on my demo reel.

I tried a couple new things in Maya today. They seemed to work out pretty well.

The first was taking footage Chase shot of 2 pennies on the counter and tracking them in Maya. Once it has the movement of the dots (pennies) known, you can apply that movement to the virtual camera, and stick some objects into the scene, and render that out.

The result of my test was a virtual ball and sphere looking decently like they're sitting on our real counter-top.

The second thing I tried was to basically rotoscope a prebuilt character over the movements of someone on film. This is only half done, and very rough, but you can get the idea of where it is going in the movie. I didn't even touch the back arm, which is why it looks gimpy, and the camera moves I tried to match to the handheld footage as best as possible (no good tracking dots there, though I could try it...hmm..).

You can view the videos by continuing reading. They're about 5 megs total, so if you're on dial up, you may have a little wait.

First Pencil Render

I've started modeling one of the characters for my animation. You should be able to link to it. (I'm testing the trackback feature.)

My 3D Final is done. Unfortunately I don't have a small movie version of it that I can upload at the moment. But if you go to the page you can see a shotlist with images from each shot rendered out and pretty.

I've done a lot of work for my 3D final project. Most of the character models are done, and there's a few shots of the set.